Well, this year has disappeared before my very eyes. Catching up on my reading goals as best I can, as I fell off the bandwagon for a bit while I figured out how to promote my own book. I’m back on and looking to crush the rest of the year with reading (and writing book two). Here’s what I managed to get through in September…
Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The second Tchaikovsky book I’ve read and I think I enjoyed this one more. It’s heavy sci-fi space opera stuff that can get slow in Act II, but interesting characters carry the story along and keep you invested. It’s part of The Final Architecture trilogy, and while, to be honest, it was pretty dense and I don’t remember the details, I’d revisit this series and finish it. But it made me think of pacing and how I want to tell stories, how to balance information, world building, and plot while not running into Act II sludge, where I find myself scanning pages. A lot of people are into that, which is fine, just not for me.
This was a freebie through Amazon’s monthly book club thing. It was pretty standard crime fare. There’s a body at the start, two cops coming together through certain circumstances who work together on the case, filling each other’s gaps in knowledge and approach. The chapters are super short, like two pages short at times. While it was fairly standard crime genre fiction, I felt it lingered almost too much on character introspection. Don’t get me wrong, drama and characters working through that drama is good stuff. But this got to the point where it became repetitive. I found myself thinking, didn’t I just read this chapter two pages ago? I get their sad, let’s move on.
I like to check out some of the old school crime / noir stories every once in awhile. A good old fashion Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler noir is a fun, quick reads. The Hunter had been on my list for awhile. It’s a classic, very straightforward, revenge story. Crime gone wrong, guy gets setup, guy gets revenge. The end. Character development is tight and the story moves at a brisk pace.
